


Soldier Boys

by Todesengel



Category: Voltron: Lion Voltron
Genre: M/M, Recreational Drug Use, War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-17
Updated: 2005-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:49:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Todesengel/pseuds/Todesengel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's his home planet -- or at least it was -- and Keith's going to fight for whatever he has left down there. Hunk's just along to make sure Keith's "goddamn hero" genes don't get everybody killed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soldier Boys

Hunk was waiting for Keith in the airlock with his duffle bag slung over one shoulder and wearing the half-scowl that meant that he was annoyed and feeling obstinate. For a fleeting moment Keith thought about pulling rank and getting a couple of brawny security officers to haul Hunk away, but that'd just be a brief reprieve and Hunk would just end up being pissed and Keith knew all too well what life with a pissed off Hunk was like. So, instead, he'd just boarded the waiting launch and pretended that everything was normal when Hunk followed him in.

"So how'd you crack my clearance codes this time," Keith said when they were about halfway to the outer atmosphere.

"Didn't," Hunk grunted, and Keith suddenly realized that this was more than mere annoyance, because when Hunk was annoyed his voice went low and rumbling and he orated at great length on what, precisely, had annoyed him. He didn't become quiet and grind out brusque answers when he was merely annoyed. "I just read the latest news dump."

"Ah." Keith fidgeted with the strap on his duffle bag and, yes, he should have anticipated something like this. He should have known that Hunk would be able to deduce what Keith had planned once he heard the news, that Hunk would follow him because that was just the way Hunk was -- for some inexplicable reason, Hunk had come to the conclusion that Keith was constitutionally incapable of looking after himself and that therefore it was Hunk's purpose in life to watch over him like some sort of nurse maid. Not that Hunk was entirely lacking in a basis for this assumption, Keith had to admit. After all, the first time they met was when Hunk cold cocked him and dragged him out of Main Engineering before a Jump-Drive overload gave him the briefest career as a Captain in the history of the Alliance. Which, yes, had been a fairly stupid act on his part, being down there in the first place, especially since he wasn't even very good at Jump-Drive mechanics but, as he told Hunk after he got over his anger at being knocked unconscious via the less-than-delicate application of a hyper-spanner to the back of his head and after Hunk got finished with yelling at him for being a bloody _hero_ and they needed one of those aboard like they needed a leaky oxygen tank or a level-five hull breach, he had nimble fingers that could reach those small, hard-to-get-at places and he followed instructions quite well -- he should, he'd been in one military institution or another for as long as he'd been old enough to form a clumsy salute -- and it was _his ship_ , damn it all, and his crew, and he was _not_ going to just sit around when they were in danger and he was still capable of helping out in some way. As Keith recalled, Hunk had just sighed, looked quite put upon, and started treating him like he was some dim 5-year-old who couldn't be trusted to not wee in his pants when he got excited and not like the latest rising star of the Alliance Space Forces -- which he was, he had to be, he was the only person in the history of the Alliance to be made a captain at the age of 26. That had to mean something more than the fact that the war was going badly for them; even if they were scarping the bottom of the barrel, the Brass wouldn't give command of a ship of the Line to some inexperienced kid.

Hunk apparently thought they would -- had done so, in fact. Not that Keith really minded the attention, although he'd never tell Hunk that; it was kind of nice to be able to rely on -- to _trust_ \-- someone so completely. Hunk had his back, and Keith would have put up with all the grumbling and complaining and disapproving stares and the fact that Hunk apparently had no concept of rank or personal space for that.

But this was different. This was personal, and as much as he wanted Hunk to be down on the planet with him, it wasn't Hunk's place. This wasn't Hunk's fight, and Keith didn't think he could live with himself if Hunk died because of this.

"It's my home planet," Keith said, somewhat defensively. "My people are being conquered and I can't just sit up there, all safe and sound in my ship, while that happens."

"Only you would think of being on the Line as 'safe and sound'," Hunk said.

"Whatever." Keith waved away the idiosyncrasies of his personality with a lazy flick of his wrist. "Point is, I'm needed down there and you're needed up here, on the _Aspire_." He looked Hunk straight in the eyes for the first time since he entered the airlock and saw Hunk waiting there. "The crew needs the best damn mechanic in the 'verse more than I do."

"What the crew needs," Hunk said, his gaze as unwavering as the finger he jabbed Keith in the chest with, "is for their captain to come back in one piece."

"I could order you to go back." It was a feeble and desperate attack and they both knew it, but Keith had to make the attempt.

"No," Hunk said, and he crossed his arms and slouched back in his seat, arrogant in his victory. "You really couldn't."

*

Samuel Hawkins was Career, although that wasn't a hard thing to be. There was always one war or another going on, because that was just the way the universe was. The Alliance and the Federation fought and had always fought and would always fight; the reason -- if there had ever been a reason to begin with -- for this animosity had long since been forgotten, but that didn't matter. Every time it looked like the ancient war was dying down, there'd be a new member planet who'd bring all of its blood feuds with it, and the fighting would start up again.

Fighting. Ha! The whole war as just a joke, just an excuse to get rid of the excess passions of the young and allow the sons and daughters of farmers to put on uniforms and strut about town, showing off the shiny, meaningless medals pinned to their chests. It wasn't war, it was just some ships staring each other down across the Neutral Zone and lobbing warning shots across each others bows. People didn't die in service, didn't bleed, didn't hate -- it was a joke and a past time and nobody took it seriously.

Not until the Drules came, anyway.

The dull thud of anti-aircraft fire exploding in the night sky shook Hawkins back into the present. He thought he would have grown used to the noise by now, but as the days became months and bled into one another, he was beginning to realize that he would never become used to the sound.

Hawkins pushed the thought out of his mind and returned his attention to the two men who stood before him. They were young, he thought, and the larger one on the right looked a bit green, his breathing labored as he took in lungful after lungful of the oxygen heavy air. They walked stiffly and rolled a bit, and that more than anything marked them as Spacers. Hawkins wondered, for a moment, what they were doing here on the Ground, but he could always used more bodies down here, and he wasn't about to complain, even after he glanced at their papers and saw that they'd volunteered for this posting.

"Captain Keith Asano, is it?" he said, wishing idly for a pair of glasses so he could stare at the two of them over the rims.

"Yes sir." The boy stood ramrod straight, and Hawkins filed him away as Career. Probably graduated from the Academy, if he was a Captain at his age.

"And you're..." Hawkins looked down at the papers again, just to confirm, "Crewman Marion St. John."

"It's pronounced 'Sinjin'," the big man said, followed by a grudging "Sir" after Keith kicked him in the ankle. "But most people call me Hunk."

'I bet they do,' Hawkins thought to himself. He flipped through their files, having long since learned that the best way to deal with volunteers was to keep them waiting. At least that way they'd hear the screams of the wounded and feel the rumbling of the bombs in a place of relative safety; better to break them of their heroic notions here, where they weren't likely to be killed. "Says here you were both posted to the _A.C.S Aspire_. You know anything about ground wars?"

"A little, sir. Did some ground force training in the Academy." Hawkins nodded and raised an eyebrow at Hunk, figuring rightly that he didn't need to ask the question.

"I've been around," was all Hunk said, and damn him if Hawkins wasn't starting to like the kid. He was smart, and he'd probably make it to the end, because Hawkins could believe that this kid had been around.

"Why are you here?" he asked, suddenly, and it was Keith who answered first.

"I'm from here, sir. I know the terrain. Thought I could help." He sounded defensive, even though he wasn't really the one Hawkins had been questioning.

"Big planet," Hawkins told him.

"I know, sir." And for the first time, the kid lowered his head enough to stare Hawkins in the eyes; he had calm eyes, and Hawkins thought that maybe he'd underestimated this one, slotted him away with all the other young punks who made Captain and Colonel before they were 40 just because there was a war and they had some basic command experience. "But I know this planet."

Hawkins nodded, and looked away. "And you? Why are you here?"

"I go where he goes," Hunk said and Hawkins had never seen anybody blush quite like Keith did, starting at the tips of his ears and slowly bleeding down his neck before ever making it to his face.

"Hunk," Keith said, underneath Hawkins, "Now look, boys, I know that things in Space are a little different but --"

"He's a hero," Hunk growled out. "A great big bloody fucking hero. And I'm here to make sure he doesn't end up in hero chunks."

"Hunk!" Keith sounded mortified and although Hawkins was now mostly sure that he wasn't going to commit the cardinal sin of the battlefield by sending two guys who were fucking to the same foxhole, he still felt a tiny pinprick of doubt. Too late, though, Charlie company needed a new officer, and if this kid said he knew the land then who was Hawkins to throw away an advantage. Especially one that might get them all off of this planet a little sooner.

"Fine." Hawkins thrust some papers across the table. "Report to Charlie company for a mission briefing. You," and he nodded at Hunk, "go get the gear and get oriented."

"I go," Hunk started to say.

"Where I tell you," Hawkins finished for him. He was already onto other things and didn't have the time to be listening to this boy whine. "Hop to, boy. Or didn't they teach you discipline in Space?"

 

*

 

There was a lecture going on in the big tent in the middle of the field, and Hunk slid into a seat in the back just as the doctor up front got finished asking "Right, how many of you lot are from this place?"

A quarter of the hands went up and the doc nodded, mostly to himself. "Feel free to ignore this part," he said, and then the lights went dim and a giant picture of a strawberry filled the screen the doc was standing in front of. "Okay, listen up," he said, in a not very loud voice. "I'm supposed to give you a briefing on what local flora and fauna will kill you before the Drules and the Feds have a chance to do it themselves. So. If you come across a plant that looks like a strawberry and smells like a strawberry, for the sake of whatever deity you happen to believe in, do _not_ eat it see if it also tastes like a strawberry. It does, but it'll also cause all of your internal organs to swell up and you will die." The doc's voice was very straightforward and Hunk found himself mildly frightened. He wondered if the man was the base's permanent doctor or if he was coming with them and hoped that he didn't. "Do not climb trees with black bark. You will get stuck to them and then we'll have to use acid to get you free. It will hurt. Quite a bit. Do not ingest any fruits that you happen to find lying on the ground, even if they're something you've eaten before. The enemy may have booby-trapped them, or we may have booby-trapped them and in either case, you will die. If you see an animal that looks like a giant pig, do not attempt to hunt it down and eat it. It will have friends and they will gore you, and you will die." The doc looked down at some note cards and then shook his head. "Look. Just don't eat anything that grows here unless you're from here or it's being served to you in the mess tent. Oh," and here the doc looked up and glared at the skinny dude running the projector, who was grinning like he wasn't afraid of anything, especially not the guy glaring at him, "and for the love of all that's holy, if you happen to find a planet with purple leaves, do _not_ make a fire using it. _It_ won't kill you, but I might."

The recruits in the tent shuffled their feet, clearly sure that this lecture was over and anxious to get their hands on some weaponry. The slide on the projector changed from one of a giant, purple-leafed plant to that of a gas mask, and in the low groan that rose up from everyone in the tent, Hunk made his exit. He figured he'd been oriented enough and it was time to check on Keith and make sure he hadn't managed to do something heroic since they'd been apart.

"Let's talk about chemical warfare," the doc was saying as Hunk slid out of the tent and into the too hot world. A shell exploded a few kilometers away, and even in the middle of the afternoon, the fireworks it made and the giant torch that had been the tree it hit were brilliantly different from those of a ship exploding in space. More noise, too, and if Hunk hadn't been a prideful man, he might have thought about requesting a transfer back up to the _Aspire_ , where the only noise was the hum of the engine as it turned below the deck, and the temperature was always just right.

 

*

 

It was always too loud and it was always too hot, except when it was too cold, and after six months the air still burned his lungs. Hunk missed space like he thought he would miss a limb, and the fact that he'd managed to pull Keith's ass out of the fryer more times than he should have only made the ache worse. At least in space the worse thing Keith could do was get in the way during an overload, and even then there was always _somebody_ willing to drag him out of Engineering after Hunk knocked him out. Here, though, there were a thousand different ways for Keith to try and kill himself in the name of his men, and each and every one of them painful and lingering.

Sven wrapped up Hunk's burnt hands and stuck a small can of salve into his pocket. "Twice a day," he said, "and make sure you're putting clean bandages on it." He very obviously said nothing about how the injury occurred or what steps Hunk could take to prevent it from occurring again, viz. not grabbing onto an overheated piece of artillery and laying down a covering fire until Keith and the rest of the squad were back in the dugouts. He also didn't say anything about how Keith almost always managed to get out of a fight completely intact, while Hunk usually required several stitches and a tetanus shot after even the lightest skirmish.

Hunk nodded. They had an understanding, him and Sven, which was only natural as the first time Hunk was injured in the line of keeping Keith's ass safe, he'd punched Sven out and limped his way back up to the front because he'd heard a rumor that there was going to be a major battle the next day. "Will do," he said, and tried to figure out who in the world was going to apply the salve.

"Hey, Svenie! Got any food?"

Lance entered in a burst of heat and noise that disrupted the relative cool and quiet of the med-tent and Hunk glared at him, until he saw the bloody bandage on Lance's leg, and he reined it in until it was just a scowl. Lance flipped him off in a good-natured way and limped over to an empty bed.

"I told you not to pick at it," Sven said, instead of asking when, or how. He shoved a ration bar into Lance's hand and peeled the bandage off. The wound wasn't bad -- mostly healed for all the blood and pus that was leaking out.

"It itched," Lance said around the crumbling brown crap they got fed. "I mean, it really, really itched."

"If it gets infected, it's your own damn fault."

Lance sighed. "I know, I know. It's going to get infected and then I'm going to _die_." He winked at Hunk, who'd stopped scowling and was starting to get amused.

"Idiot." Sven ran a flame over a scalpel, then drained the wound, ignoring Lance's only slightly melodramatic howls of protest. "If it gets infected, then I'm going to chop the leg off and what good is a runner with only one fucking leg."

"Aww," Lance said after he stopped screaming. "You care about me." He blinked coquettishly up at Sven, who flicked him in the forehead in response, and all Hunk could think was 'wierdos. I'm surrounded by wierdos.'

"Idiot," Sven said again. He took Hunk in with his glare and added, "that goes for both of you." His pockets dimpled with the sudden lumps of his hands. "Look. I don't want to see you two in here for a while so you. Put the salve of his hands and you. Make sure he doesn't get that leg wound infected. Got it?"

They both nodded, almost like contrite schoolboys, except Lance had this weird, mischievous look in his eyes. Like the forehead flick meant something more than casual annoyance. Sven nodded as well, not quite looking satisfied, and when his hands came out of the pockets they were holding a packet of smokes a lighter. "Fine. Now get the fuck out of my tent."

They walked back to the dugouts together, Lance leaning a little on Hunk's shoulder, and it was strange the way six months could make anybody who wasn't firing on you seem like a friend.

"This is my hole," Hunk said, and Lance nodded.

"Right. See you in a couple of hours." And, in a couple of hours, Lance was sliding under the camouflage and into his foxhole like it was home base and he was Babe Ruth. "Yo," he said. "D'jya miss me?" And he grabbed one of Hunk's ration bars and popped half of it into his mouth.

Hunk stared at Lance in a combination of surprise and, well mostly surprise -- surprise that he'd show up in the first place and surprise at Lance's audacity, but mostly it was surprise at the blood on his forehead. Blue blood, which meant Drules, which meant a battle was going to be coming soon.

"Drules?"

"Took care of 'em. Advance party, scouts maybe." Lance finished the ration bar and when he drank out of his canteen, water cascaded down his chin and soaked his shirt. With his free hand he reached into the inner pocket of his entirely not standard issue jacket and produced a small bag filled with little purple leaves. "Want a smoke?"

Hunk raised an eyebrow. "Are these off of that plant Sven got so pissed about during orientation?"

"Yup." Lance was still grinning, and he began to roll the leaves into a passable smoke as he talked, using what looked like a page torn out of the rules and regs book they'd all been handed. "Found out about these babies maybe the second week I was here. I made a fire, right, and shit, the next time I was aware of anything it was Tuesday." Lance grinned even more and lit the end of his rollup. "The Tuesday two weeks after I left. I think there was moss growing on me. Powerful shit, man."

Hunk took a long drag and, yeah, this was definitely good. He had a feeling that if he continued to smoke this, he'd forget about all of the little aches and pains in his life, like the heat and his hands and the whole reason he was down on this fucking planet in the first place.

"You love him, don't you," Lance said and the nice little buzz Hunk had been riding suddenly dropped away and the rollup tasted like ashes in his mouth.

"No," Hunk began and then he shrugged and decided he was enough of a man not to panic about something a stupid as his feelings. "Yeah." He squinted at Lance through the smoke. "Like you're one to talk, though."

Lance shrugged back. "What can I say? I've loved him pretty much my entire life." His grin turned strange and he scratched at the back of his left shoulder, an idle gesture that seemed to give away something important, the answer to some great mystery that Hunk couldn't understand. "Not that that's been a really long time, or anything," he added.

Hunk decided that now was as good a time as any to drink the contraband beer he'd been given by a couple of grunts who'd gotten leave. "Here's to oblivious men," he said as he tossed one over to Lance. The foam gave him a mustache and he licked it off without looking in Lance's direction.

"Yeah. I can drink to that."

And that became that. They'd smoke some and talk more -- about important things and unimportant things and life before the war. Or rather, Hunk talked about the things he did before the war -- the operas he'd sung in, the cities he'd lived in -- and Lance talked about Sven -- how he was a third year resident when he got drafted, how he'd always been the one to look after Lance even before he became a doctor -- and neither of them mentioned how they'd followed a guy into hell and were never even noticed. After the kid -- who'd almost taken Lance's hand off when he'd reached down and ruffled his curls -- joined them, they talked less and smoked more because if anybody needed to relax it was him, this little bundle of hate and death who went crazy at the sight of Drules. Hunk swore he saw Pidge foaming at the mouth, once, and Lance told him to ease up on the grass.

"Kid lost his planet," Lance said, quietly, one evening in an entirely different foxhole than the one where they'd started this. "He's got a reason to be mad."

"Not a fucking kid," Pidge growled out, sleepy and stoned, and cradling his rifle like it was a teddy bear. "I'm," he yawned, wide enough to show them his tonsils, "an adult."

"Sure, Pidge," Hunk said. He pulled Pidge's glasses off, and tucked them into the neck of his shirt. "Whatever you say."

Lance peeled the covering back and peeked out over the lip of the hole at the endless blackness of the forest that surrounded them. He looked up at the stars and then over at Hunk and said, "It's going to be a quiet night."

Hunk nodded.

"The Infant's out for the count," Lance said and Hunk nodded again, wondering where Lance was going with this.

"D'ya ever get, like, insufferably horny," Lance said and Hunk thought 'aha', and they started fucking after that. And if Lance was slightly scary and completely crazy and tended to eat anything not nailed down -- as if making up for some lack of food in the mysterious days of his youth that he'd never talk about -- then he made up for all of his faults by being fucking amazing in bed. And Hunk had been around, in more ways than one, and he knew from good in bed.

"Shit," he said the night they were in a town, fucking in the bombed out shell of some apartment building, the ceiling and two walls open to the night air. "How'd you get so damn good?"

"I'm from Arcadia Prime," Lance told him, and when that wasn't enough, apparently, he flipped onto his stomach and tried to point at the tattoo on his left shoulder, the omega followed by a bunch of numbers. "I'm a rentboy," he said, into the shoddy mattress they'd taken over. "Or I was. Sex was my life. I was made for sex." And there was no shame in his words, or regret, so Hunk decided that it wasn't a big deal and he'd reap whatever benefits there were to having mutual pity fucks with a guy genetically engineered to be good in bed.

"Damn. Wish I'd known more guys like you when I was younger," Hunk told him. "Would've saved me _years_ of bad blowjobs."

Lance laughed at him, not with him, but Hunk didn't mind, because he was fucked and comfortable and the ever-present boom of bombs and flack were millions of kilometers away. After three years on this planet -- three years of slogging through red-stained mud, and then shivering beneath red-stained snow -- being in this bombed out building, lying on a lumpy, broken mattress, bare-assed to the two low moons was a close to a vacation as Hunk figured he was ever going to get. And even if it was Lance who'd fucked him and not Keith, well, it didn't matter.

They fucked again, because they weren't on duty, and when the first light of morning barged into the building, the vacation was over, and a missile landed in the middle of the town square. Pidge followed the light in, and he was already decked for combat when he kicked them off the mattress, using the barrel of his gun to lever it off the frame.

"Come on," he said, and he was way too happy about the war resuming. "Put your junk away and gear up! Word is, there's a contingent of Drules manning the outpost we're taking."

"Shit," Hunk swore, casually, and he shoved his feet into the wrong pair of boots. "Fuck," he said after he sorted out their clothes, pulled on the heavy, padded vest that did nothing against the weapons they had nowadays. He gave Lance a mostly playful shove and said, "Better tell that doc of yours to reserve me a table. Don't want to be left hanging in the crunch because some asshole forgot to phone ahead."

Lance laughed at him again, his voice wafting up the stairwell, mixing with the clattering of his feet against the metal steps, and the noise made the half-remembered dream of a the world aboard a ship come sharply into focus. Hunk shook his head, banished the fuzzy memory. That was from a different life. This was his world now.

 

*

 

Lance loved the feeling of a cold shower, now, and it seemed to him the days of bathing in the warm salt water of A-Prime's oceans were like a story somebody told him, maybe Sven, or something he dreamed up in a fever. Because those days seem unreal, compared to the harshness of cold water beating down on his tired body and washing away dirt and blood and death, washing it off of the bodies of everybody else in Charlie, sending their communal sins spiraling down the drain set in the middle of this rigged together locker room. Through the haze of soap and water and sweat, he looked around, at the kids and strangers he was flashing, picking out a familiar face here, there. None of the guys he did basic with were still around; transferred out to flesh out less experienced units, or killed or on medical leave. Everyone here was a replacement, some still so green that they threw up after the battle, adding their own distinctive colors to an already busy canvas.

"Hey! Hurry up, fuckers!" Someone shook the canvas siding they used to protect the privacy of the females, and Lance considered, briefly, staying under the badly-pressurized spray of really fucking cold water a few minutes longer, just for spite. But they were only allowed fifteen for a shower, and times almost up, so he stepped out and grabbed a threadbare towel to wrap around himself instead.

Outside of the showers, it was colder than Lance liked and he didn't dawdle over dressing like he sometimes did. Not like it mattered today, since Sven was stuck in the med-tent for a few more hours and Hunk had disappeared after they were sure the fighting was over, and if those two weren't around then there was nobody worth putting a show on for. Instead, he dressed and wandered over to the med-tent, to watch Sven yell at the other medics and just be the scary-ass motherfucker Lance knew and obsessed over.

He was still wearing that ridiculous priest's outfit, which Lance alone knew came from the hospital he'd been doing his residency at -- an attachment to some monastery which only made sense on A-Prime if you knew that those monks believed that they could atone for the sins of every sinner in the Arcadia system by facing temptation and ignoring it every day. Lance thought that maybe the outfit wasn't the only thing Sven picked up from the monks, because before he started his residency there, he used to play with Lance's hair, and make lewd suggestions that made Lance's kinkiest clients sound like they were into vanilla sex. He stopped doing that and Lance wasn't quite sure when the end happened, but the last days on A-Prime were kind of hazy, a mixture of fear and death and the throat-closing realization that life would never be the same, his world would never be the same, the beautiful things would be destroyed by the rain of fire sent down from ships that never broke the atmosphere.

But Lance had resolved to stop thinking about those things, so he sat down on an empty cot and watched Sven being a tyrant instead.

"'S the matter?" Sven asked, in between throwing an empty bed pan at some poor schmuck who'd been roped into being a nurse for the day and stitching up another schmuck who'd slipped while exiting the showers and cut open his leg on a piece of shrapnel he'd taken as a souvenir and was about to receive a lecture on why scrap metal did not make the best present to send home to mum. "You sick again?"

Lance shrugged, and Sven put his hand against Lance's forehead. They both knew that this wasn't the world or the weather or the life that Lance had been built for and it wasn't unusual for him to start coughing up blood as his body rebelled against this sudden change of vocation. Lance knew, though, that he was about as healthy as he'd ever been before, and that the only reason he was in here was to feel this brief touch, to watch Sven move. Not that Sven knew that, of course, and maybe Lance was a little sick because he'd never been engineered to fall in love.

"Fucker," Sven said after a minute. "You're fine. Now stop taking up my bed space and go be useful somewhere."

"I could be useful here," Lance said, and he hopped up off the bed, displaying his best 'let me do something medical!' look, which only made Sven snort in what might have been laughter, had Sven ever laughed.

"No way. I remember what happened last time." Sven grabbed his shoulder and shoved him out the tent flap. "Go be useful near a mine field."

"So mean!" Lance called back, and he wished he could tell if this childish banter was actually foreplay on both sides or just his. Fuck, he sucked at the sweet talk. But, since Sven had more or less demanded that Lance get the fuck away, Lance got the fuck away. A couple of natives were playing music in the ruins of what used to be some sort of religious building -- or possibly a museum; it was hard to tell on this planet, where almost all of the important buildings had statuary and stained-glass windows. Lance sat down and scrubbed at his forehead and sucked the water out of a tendril of hair.

"Hey." Hunk punched him, lightly, on the shoulder and then shoved him over and sat down beside him.

"No new stitches," Lance said. "That's a first."

"I didn't have to save Keith."

Lance nodded and they listened to the natives play their music until Hunk finally said, "He's getting transferred. Back to space."

Lance leaned back, stretched out the tendons in his arms. "Bound to happen. Word is, we've got this planet pretty much taken care of." He watched Hunk out of the corner of one eye and thought about how this was the second person he thought he loved and his creators must've fucked up the gene bath somehow if he could love two people at the same time. Four if you counted Keith and the Infant, but Lance didn't like to think about those two since he had no designs on their bodies and his feelings were kind of confused and muddled, like a stream after the company had slogged through it. "You going with him?"

Lance held his breath while he waited for the answer, because he was pretty sure that this was some sort of crossroads. That this was something important, because if Hunk said 'no', then they were both pretty well fucked. If they didn't have the common bond of loving oblivious men, then they had no bond at all beyond how good it felt to find some release and never have to worry about futures and feelings and anything beyond the body. If Hunk stayed behind, that meant that what they had had moved from the body to the heart and Lance didn't think that either of them were ready for that.

"Yeah," Hunk breathed out, a whisper and a curse and a prayer all rolled into one, which would be appropriate if this building was, indeed, a holy place like Lance thought it might be. "I gotta."

Lance nodded. "See you tonight?" he asked without making it a promise.

"Nah. I need ta see if I still have some influence with the Brass, get myself attached to whatever mission he's going on. Gotta make my boy pretty for his flight, either way."

Hunk trailed his hand along Lance's shoulders as a good-bye and Lance left when it grew too dark for the musicians to play any more, although their flautist gave it a good go, sending piercingly sweet notes up to the dead stars that hung, unobscured, above them.

He found Sven in the mess tent, skin red and sore from scrubbing, and eyes just an unsympathetic as always as they stared at him over the rim of a mug of awful coffee.

"Sven," he said, stripping his voice of melodrama, "can I stay with you tonight?"

Sven raised an eyebrow -- he was good at that, the raised eyebrow, the skeptic look. It didn't hurt that he looked fucking hot when he did it, either. "What's up?"

"I think my heart is broken," Lance lied, although as he said the words they didn't feel quite like the lie he thought they were. "I want you to fix me."

"Idiot. I can't fix something like that." Sven looked down at his plate of inedible food and then back at Lance who made sure to wear his most hangdog expression. "Go find yourself a camp follower for comfort."

"Who would come to you for comfort?" Lance grinned to soften the words, though they were mostly truth. Sven had a bad rep in the company. "I just want something familiar, that's all."

"Fine," Sven sighed. "But just for tonight."

Lane nodded. Tonight was more than he'd hoped for, anyway.

 

*

 

It was, Keith knew, a bad career move to come here. Demotion, even though it wasn't a black mark on his record, and he'd be lucky to become a First Officer on a ship, now that he'd forgotten all of those skills that kept him alive in space. But this was something he had to do, and there were more young officers in the SF than there were in the GF, these days, so the Brass had been happy enough to give him an almost lateral transfer when he'd requested it. And anyway the _Aspire_ , scrappy little ship though she was -- and god, how Keith did love her -- wasn't one of the big ships on the Line, just a somewhat dinky little fighter with a tiny crew and, really, anybody could be given command of her. Which more or less validated Hunk's opinion that they were given out commands to any dimwitted son of a she-goat who could salute on cue and sign his name, but Keith didn't care. He'd had his ship, which was what he'd always wanted, ever since he'd seen the big Armada-class ships leaving ion trails in the atmosphere as they headed off to better worlds and better lives. He'd had his ship and he'd given her up to come back to a planet he didn't recognize -- first to look for his family and then, when they never showed, to fight out all of his anger until he was just drained and tired and empty of everything except the way he still vibrated with the boom of every explosion and how he still laughed at the adrenaline that filled him up like ambition and desire and life used to.

The Brass kept giving him medals for killing and Keith had long since gotten over his moral squeamishness about accepting them. Now, as the days bled into deaths, there was this new mood of hopeful optimism for an end to the ground fighting, although Keith didn't really care; kill the enemy here, kill them somewhere else, it all meant the same thing to him. But he heard things about how the Feds were worse at this whole 'in person' fighting than the Alliance, and the Drules didn't function well outside of their own environments, and it all washed out to the war being moved back up into space, which was where it really should have stayed. Nobody needed to know that when it all came down to the final blow, their guts were just like those of their enemies; it was easier to hate, to kill if all you saw were ships and explosions and you never heard the screaming or stared into the face of some poor bastard who's only crime was being born on the wrong planet.

Not that Keith cared about what was said or where he went, anymore, having lost the optimism or the innocence or whatever the fuck it was that made a man care about things. Which was why he'd been vaguely annoyed but mostly accepting of the summons that called away him from the front, from mopping up the remnants of a lost army who didn't know that they'd lost just yet, and back to one of the few cities that still stood completely intact. To Harumi, as beautiful and graceful as he remembered, and he expected the words 'good job, nice work, give 'em hell, wish I could be with you boys, fighting the good fight, we'll all be home by the winter holiday' and blah, blah, blah. He certainly didn't expect the truth, didn't expect to sit in a top level security room with three other young, empty captains, didn't expect to be told that because he'd done so well down on the ground and up in space he'd been slated to commit suicide. He didn't expect to be told to believe in fairytales, that legends were the last chance the Alliance had, that in a year, maybe three, there wouldn't be any more ground fighting because every last Alliance planet would be under Federation control, taken from space with Drule weapons. That if they didn't do this, didn't abandon their posts and the men they kept alive, and chase after last chances and lost dreams then they were condemning every innocent who never picked up a gun or stared into death, to slavery and torture and who knew what else.

Keith was pretty sure that he agreed to do this only because the only thing he had left was what Hunk called his 'fucking hero gene'. Because he still believed in saving his people no matter what his eyes and his soul told him about the hopelessness of his cause. Which was why Keith was back here, in what used to be his hometown (of this fact he was sure, he even saw his house, saw the little shrine to his accomplishments that his father had kept, miraculously undamaged, saw the scrawl of his name next to his tiny hand prints in the cement behind the old nursery school, saw the rows of fresh, white-washed wooden grave markers that sang out in silent, constant testament to the lives that would never be saved) and all he thought about was how selfish he was for submitting Hunk's name to the Brass even before the ink was dry on his papers.

But Hunk was Hunk and if Keith was going to go off and be stupid, he sure as fuck all wasn't going to do it without Hunk around. Hell, the only reason he was even in one piece and not buried in some soldier's grave -- bodies heaped on top of one another, a piece of wood to mark the spot and dog tags mailed back to the Brass so that they could reduce pain down to statistics and numbers -- was because Hunk always managed to find exactly the right place to be.

If Keith still had sex with other people -- and god, sometimes he wished he still could, could overcome that last bit of ethics on his part and say 'fuck the rules, I don't care if it's someone in my command, I'm going to get laid'; or barring that, could at least go in for casual sex and one night stands and not being embarrassed at all about leaving some cash on the dresser and sneaking out in the middle of the night -- he was positive that the first person he'd throw to the ground and have his rather kinky way with would be Hunk.

Although, from Keith's seriously frustrated shoes, shoes that had seen no fucking since he got a ship and, fuck, that was seven years of just him and his hand, that one last hurdle seemed to be about as tall and impenetrable as the likelihood of anybody finding this Voltron-thing they'd been charged with acquiring.

Keith rubbed the stubble that had accumulated over the past couple of days and here, in this place, with the bombs landing all around them, he decided that he needed to shave. If only because if his dad was still alive (hope, always hope, because there were no names on those white grave markers, no ages, only dates for when they died), he'd kick Keith's ass from here to Shinjuku and back again.

Lather first, and then the knife he'd picked up off the body of some Drule, two months into this gig. Slow, smooth strokes; first the right cheek, then the left, then his upper lip and finally his neck and chin. Just like how his father taught him, and if he was using a bit of polished steel and a knife instead of a mirror and a razor, that was all right. It was still something mostly normal and Keith would take anything resembling normalcy at this point.

The building shook and Keith's hand slipped. The knife made a neat slice in his chin before Keith could steady himself, and he cursed, softly, pressing against the shallow cut in an effort to stem the blood. He stood patiently, waiting to see if there would be another shock, but the world remained steady, so he began to shave himself again. He wiped the foam and hair from his blade and readjusted the bit of steel. He heard the door open behind him and he turned, knife at the ready.

"Hey Skipper." Hunk closed the door behind him as Keith turned back.

"Hunk." Keith lathered on some more foam and raised his chin. "We're in the ground forces now. You shouldn't call me Skipper."

"What's a harmless eccentricity between friends? Besides, you're still my Captain." Hunk took the knife away from Keith. "Here. Let me." He ran the knife gently down Keith's throat. "So. I heard that you're going back to Space."

"Yeah. The Brass handed me my orders last night." Keith spoke quietly, barely moving his lips.

"Figured that was when it happened." The soft _shick shick_ of the knife as it ran over Keith's skin was loud in the little room. Hunk maneuvered the blade around the lump of Keith's Adam's apple. "Congratulations."

"Thank you." Keith tilted his head until he could look at Hunk with a reasonable amount of comfort. "You should be receiving yours today." Hunk's hands stilled and Keith smirked, a little. "What? You thought I'd be stupid enough to go back without the best mechanic in the 'verse? You thought I'd just leave you here?"

"It's been a while," Hunk said. He wiped the blade off and began shaving Keith again. "I don't know if I'm still the best."

"Are you going to watch my ass? Are you going to make sure that I'm well protected when I do stupid, heroic things?" Keith caught Hunk's nod out of the corner of his eye, and dwelt, briefly, on the might-have-beens if he hadn't been in command. Because, really, how much of a hard on did he have for this guy if he let him get this close to his throat with a very sharp knife. "Then I don't see a problem. Besides. It wouldn't be right if you weren't there. Who else can I trust?"

The building shock again, harder this time, the shell having landed closer to them, and Keith stumbled into Hunk, who grabbed him instinctively. Plaster dust rained down around their ears and in the quiet aftermath, Keith's high, wild laugh was shockingly loud. "See," he said from the confines of Hunk's arms. "What would I do without you?"

Hunk tightened his embrace, briefly, then released Keith. He wiped the plaster off of his shoulders and sighed. "Well. At least it'll be quieter."

Keith just shrugged, because he'd grown used to the noise, now. He picked up the knife from where Hunk had dropped it and slid it into its sheath. "Listen," he said, "I need three other guys. It's this. There's this thing."

Hunk raised an eyebrow, and Keith thought that maybe Hunk had been spending too much time around Sven because he didn't remember Hunk being quite so facially skeptical. "What's the mission?" Hunk said.

"Can't tell you yet." Which wasn't entirely true, but Keith was mostly positive that even Hunk would say 'fuck, no.' if he knew what the mission really was. "Look, just give me the name of three other -- no, two other guys you can count on, okay?" Because he was already thinking ahead and he was pretty sure that if he was going to strip the outfit of the best guys he might as well take Sven along, too; the other medics might not be quite as good as Sven, but they weren't as mean and didn't kick quite so hard at men who were already down.

"Lance and Pidge," Hunk said without any thought. "They're good, but replaceable. 'Sides, I think we need to get Pidge away from Drules before he goes completely apeshit and can't come back." Hunk was already flipping through the files on the table Keith had claimed as his desk, looking for the transfer orders. "And I'm assuming you're taking Sven. Because Lance and Sven -- they're a boxed set."

"Right, right." Keith sat down on his bed and wondered, mostly to fill up the void in his head, what Hunk would do if Keith pulled down his pants and gave him a blow job. Would he be embarrassed? Surprised? Thrilled? Or had it been so damn long since Keith had last done anything like that that it would be painful and awkward because, really, there's a lot of things you could tell your CO, but 'dude, you're really bad at that' was probably not one of them, not even something Hunk would say.

"Yeah, should've figured as much," he said instead. "So. Pidge? Little guy, right? From one of the other outpost planets."

"Balto," Hunk said, and he put the requisitions in front of Keith to sign. "I'll tell him. Lance too." And there was something slightly funny about the way Hunk said Lance's name that made Keith want to ask questions he knew Hunk wouldn't answer.

Another bomb exploded nearby, rocking the building, and Keith listened to the noise it made. One of the Feds', he was sure of it. There was a different quality of noise to their bombs, a different sort of metallic shrieking, perhaps, that occurred when the outer shell casing shattered and became a thousand pieces of red-hot pain. Something about the alloys the Feds used that made it just different enough from the Alliance bombs or the Drule bombs -- a miniscule difference that meant all the world to a guy who'd listened to all three go off day and night for three years.

When the dust settled again, Hunk said, "You deal with Sven."

"Fine." And that, at least, Keith could understand. There were very, very few people who wanted to interact with Sven more than was absolutely necessary; by and large because Sven was just a difficult motherfucker who tended to express his anger in physical terms. Keith actually found him rather comforting -- he understood Sven, understood that they were both empty men who were hanging on to what they did with their teeth and nails, and hoping that by being the job they'd manage to become something else. Something real. Something whole and not broken by reality.

"Oh," he added. "And make sure that those idiots stop shelling us, okay?"

"Sure." Hunk folded the new orders neatly and kept looking down at the table. "This is about Voltron, isn't it," Hunk said quietly.

"God damnit. Stop reading my mail, Hunk," and Keith wasn't even all that pissed off about it, but he had to put the right face on, he had to pretend in the right way. "It's a security leak."

"Do you really believe that this'll work?"

Keith wanted to say no, but he shrugged instead. "Maybe," he said, quietly. "I hope so."

 

*

 

Sven sat outside his tent -- which he always set up, even if they were in a town like this one, because it made the men nervous to think of him skulking in the shadows of the same building they were sleeping in -- and lit his next cigarette on the cinder of his last one. The ground around his feet was littered with the better part of a packet, and he knew he was setting a bad example, but fuck it. He wanted to smoke until he couldn't taste anything but ash, and he knew it wasn't going to kill him, which maybe meant that he was cheating.

"Hey, Doc, that's bad for your body!" some passing grunt shouted, probably still drunk on adrenaline and cheap booze if he was bold enough to speak to Sven.

"Do as I say, not as I do, asshole," Sven shouted back, and he grabbed a pebble and flicked it hard enough at the idiot to make the kid yelp in sudden pain and clutch his ear. He took a long drag and made a mental note to make this evening's mandatory lecture all about the dangers of chain-smoking without the benefits of a modified genetic structure.

The main reason Sven chain-smoked, even though he'd seen firsthand what chain-smoking did to a set of lungs, was because he could metabolize the tar in the cigarettes and he hoped, secretly, that someday he'd overload his body's mutated genes and contract lung cancer. Too much of anything was bad for the body, even water, even salt, even oxygen. So it stood to reason that if he smoked enough, he'd eventually manage to overcome what had been done to him in the womb and then. Well, he didn't know what he was going to do after that. Prove he was more than just the sum of his genes, maybe, or that he could overcome the plan that had been etched into every cell of his body.

The thing was, Sven knew that the whole schtick about life being precious was a lie. Life was something to be bought or sold, and that there was nothing money couldn't buy or fix. He'd known these things since he was seven and his father took him out to the Body Farm on Arcadia Prime and shown him the things growing in the vats and tubes that stretched out for kilometers in the underground facility. He'd been fascinated, then, and a little afraid as well, and he'd stared unabashedly at the finished products, all neatly numbered and catalogued and slick and wobbly like the new born horses he once saw on somebody else's farm.

"Svenie, listen to me," his father had then said, holding on to his hand so tightly that it hurt. "Take a good look at these things. You're not like them, no matter what anybody says. You're real."

And he'd believed that, until he was thirteen and found out what his father did to him, what little experiments he'd been put through long before he'd been old enough to breathe on his own, let alone chain-smoke a pack of cigarettes on some foreign planet. He still wanted to become a doctor, though, even though that was what his dad wanted, and he still went down to the tanks in the Body Farm and though 'not real', even when the newly grown bodies smiled at him and called him a 'good kid' as they were taught all of the things that real people wouldn't do. Like have sex with a stranger for money, or smile and be courteous to even the most annoying asses in the world, or drive taxis or limos or give lessons or do any of the thousands of tiny services that made a pleasure planet work. They had to be unreal because if the bodies were real than they wouldn't be doing this work, they'd be doctors and lawyers and the businessmen who profited off of their labor.

But Sven was real, even if he was mostly the same as the bodies, and he managed to believe that lie until he met Lance when he was twenty and Lance was, technically, five minutes old, even though his body was seventeen.

He could never believe that Lance wasn't real; not then, when Lance had wobbled up to him while he sat in the stairwell and smoked, and said 'hey, give me one of those', and not now, when he lay curled around the empty space on the cot where Sven had been. If Lance wasn't real -- Lance, who fucked and fought and cursed and still managed to make the clients happy, managed to be the most popular renboy on A-Prime despite being everything a rentboy wasn't supposed to be, except in all the ways that really and truly mattered like enjoying the sex -- then Sven didn't think anything was. Lance was too real, sometimes, so real that it made the rest of the world fade away and look like a painted set, dressed up for a movie scene.

But he wasn't real enough, Sven knew that, was there when Lance was first growing, just a nebulous collection of cells that became, in rapid succession, a fetus then a baby then a child then this gangly teen that was birthed by the vats and possessing the distilled statistics that were all that was needed to pass him off as a semi-real thing. Real enough to smile and talk with the clients and be whatever they paid him for; not real enough to think that sex was love or fucking was special or that there was more to life than feeling good and looking good. Not real enough to care, that was the problem, right there, because somebody, somewhere, had decided that the rentboys -- hell, all of the bodies -- had no need for such superfluous things as the capacity for romantic attachment or philosophical meta-thinking.

Lance was just a body, all said and done, and he'd never fall in love, and right now, when he was tired because he couldn't sleep next to Lance's loose-limbed graceless beauty, Sven really envied him.

"Yo," Keith said, in his ear, and Sven almost jumped, and almost used the scalpel he always kept on hand to slice open Keith's throat, and did swear, and drop his cigarette where it sizzled after landing in the mud.

"Bastard," Sven said, but not meaningfully. He liked Keith, and the cigarette wasn't too badly damaged, so he didn't feel the need for some revenge.

"Up early," Keith said, and Sven knew that this was going to be one of _those_ conversations because Keith never chit chatted without a purpose. Although the boy did love to talk.

"My bed was the victim of a hostile take over." Sven pulled the flap of his tent back just enough to expose Lance's naked, drooling, sleeping, snorting, unbeautiful form. He lit the dropped cigarette and it tasted like mud, but Sven didn't smoke the things for taste. Even so, he didn't take another drag, just let it dangle from his fingers, slowly burning down. "Didn't get much sleep, last night."

"Fuck, man, just give in already." Keith stole the cigarette and took a drag, apparently minding the mud less than Sven.

"Hello kettle, you're awful black too."

"Piece of ass like that? I say screw it and just screw him." Keith took another drag and when he spoke the smoke leaked out around his words. "Fuck, I'd jump him myself. If, y'know, I was sure you wouldn't cut my balls off and feed them to me. Hell, I might do it anyway. Sven years without tail? That's gottta be bad for your body, right? Like, medically?"

"Nah. The monks I used to live with? One of them went forty years without sex after taking his vows; and he used to be a gigolo. Celibacy is good for you. Keeps you from getting anything nasty and debilitating." Sven watched the smoke rise and shook his head. "But, I'll make you a deal. I'll fuck him the day you get over your backasswards concept of morality." Sven shook another cig out and lit it, cradling it in his hands to keep the feeble ember from being blown away in a sudden breeze that whipped his hair into his eyes. "Anyway. I want more. I want. I want everything. Love, sex, fidelity. Everything." He sighed, resolutely didn't look at the piece of ass Keith wanted to jump -- that he wanted to jump. "And if I can't have that then I'm not going to torture myself by taking what I can get and getting my hopes up."

"You don't think Lance would give you that?"

Sven shrugged and decided he'd had enough of this conversation. "So, you done with your small talk fetish or do we need to keep making meaningless noise at each other?"

"Yeah, I'm mostly done." Keith pulled out two slips of paper and handed them both to Sven, who shifted the cigarette to the corner of his mouth so he could see better. "Transfer orders. You and your boy just got volunteered to commit suicide with me. Hunk's got Lance's papers."

"Fun," Sven said, and thought 'shit'. Because now he had to tell Keith that Lance wasn't real, had to practice full disclosure because Lance wasn't the right guy for this job.

"Listen," he began, and then, "look." He took another drag and worried at the edge of his orders. "Lance," he finally said, "isn't real. He's an artificially created pleasure model. He's just a tool that was bred in a vat in a Body Farm on A-Prime for the pleasure of people with enough money to buy his body for a while. He isn't. He doesn't have the skills you need." Sven breathed in and blinked when he realized there was nothing left of his cigarette, that the butt had been viciously ground into the wood of the crate he was sitting on. "He's just. He's a toy. He isn't real."

Keith looked into the tent where Lance still snored, and he shrugged. "Seems real enough to me. He flies, right? I mean, he's good at it, right?"

Sven nodded, almost tentatively. "I don't know where he picked it up."

"Then what's the big deal?" Keith dropped the butt of his pilfered cigarette neatly onto the small pile Sven had created. He clapped Sven on the shoulder. "Look, I need you, and I wouldn't take Lance along if I didn't think he could cut it. So. Get your gear together and meet me at the command center in a half hour."

Sven tossed off a half-assed salute and stood up. He stretched and ducked into his tent and thought about stroking back the lock of Lance's hair that always fell into his eyes when he slept. Thought of waking Lance gently with a kiss and a murmured 'time to get up, sleeping beauty', but he knew that Lance was already awake; Lance never could feign sleep well, he always tensed up, just a little, right around the eyes as if forcing them to stay closed. So, instead of being gentle and kind and entirely unlike himself, Sven stuck his foot into the middle of his cot's steel frame and tipped it over, spilling Lance and his nakedness onto the ground.

"Get up, slacker," Sven growled, and he moved away and grabbed his stethoscope. "Keith wants to talk with us."

"Aww, come on Svenie, five more minutes." Lance draped himself across Sven's shoulders and snuffled at his neck. "You reek of cigarettes. Did you save one for me?"

"No. Anyway, you shouldn't smoke, it's bad for you." Sven decided that he wouldn't shake Lance off, just yet, justifying it by telling himself that Lance would just reattach himself as soon as he was able, and it was better to put up with it now because Lance would just get bored sooner. And even as he thought that, he knew that it was just a lie, and the real reason he didn't do anything was because he like the heavy weight of Lance shuffling along behind him as he picked up all of the things he needed for the day. "You'll get lung cancer and then you'll die."

"Same to you," Lance said.

"It'll take more than tar to kill me," Sven said, and then he did shake Lance off because he'd collected all of his things and if he let Lance lean on him when they left the tent it'd completely ruin the rep he'd worked so very little at building. "Come on. You owe me breakfast."

"What? No I don't."

"Payment for taking over my cot." Sven pushed the tent flap back and strode off, purposefully ignoring the way Lance hopped his way into a pair of pants before following him out.

"Harsh!" Lance shouted at him, and he pretended to pout all the way to the mess tent.

 

*

 

Hunk cornered Pidge right after he finished not-quite-killing the two Feds who'd been stupid enough to try and shell their company. He was sitting on the day bed Pidge had taken over as his bunk and looking around the set of rooms, but mostly at the empty bed in the other room that didn't look slept in at all.

"Hey," Pidge said, and he began to disassemble his rifle to clean it out. "Missed you this morning."

He didn't say a word about last night, because everybody in the company knew that Hunk had spent last night waiting for Keith to get back from command central. At least it hadn't been the med-tent, so that was something.

"Where's Lance?"

"Spent the night with Sven." Pidge scraped mud out of the rifle sight, then took out a piece of cloth and oil.

"Good for him," Hunk said, standing up with a creaking metal, and he sounded like he meant it. Pidge snorted. He'd never understand the two of them and their twisted little relationship mazes.

"So. What's the good word?"

"You're being transferred to a space mission." Hunk tucked the papers into the pocket on Pidge's jacket, then pulled Pidge up as well.

"What? No. Fuck that shit. I'm staying right here." Because, really. How was he supposed to carve out his revenge on the fucking Drules if he wasn't around to stick his knife into them?

"Orders are orders, kid, and yours is to follow them." Hunk pushed him out the door and Pidge protested loud and long all the way to the command center, where he shut up and sulked in his chair.

"So here's the deal," Keith said. "Due to reasons that make sense only to the Brass, we're being sent off on a wild goose chase. And no, you don't get to protest. This is your assignment and unless you desert, you're all still soldiers so suck it up and deal." He unfolded a map onto the table and pulled a red pencil out from behind his ear. "Anyway, to facilitate our leaving, Charlie is going to be moving out to here," and he made an 'x' about 25 kilometers outside of some town, "on the east side of Momoshiroi where they'll meet up with Alpha and Foxtrot and get their new CO. After A, C and F engage the Feds here, here, and here, we're to break off and go here," another 'x', slightly larger, "where we'll get our ship. Lance, I've heard you're good, so you're our pilot."

"No problemo, chief. I grew up on Arcadia, and we're famed for our piloting skills." Lance grinned and tilted back in his chair, obviously not at all annoyed about this sudden transfer. Sven coughed as if he'd choked on something and Hunk just shook his head and muttered about 'not the fucking _piloting_ skills that got you your rep', but Keith smiled, a little, at Lance's boasting and Pidge remembered why he didn't hate Keith as much as some of the other COs he'd been stuck with.

"Fine. Hunk, you're my mechanic, Sven, I've seen your file so I'm making you our gunner. Pidge, I understand you've got some kind of special touch with electronics; if we're going to survive a run through enemy controlled space we need to look like nothing more than a neutral ship. Up to the challenge?"

Pidge shrugged, then added "Yes, sir" when Hunk reached over and casually swatted the back of his head. Keith pretended not to notice, and ran a finger down a piece of paper he had before him.

"Right, that pretty much wraps things up. We're not scheduled to move out for the next three days, so use this time to wrap up any loose ends or what have you. That's mostly for you, Sven. Fill in the other medics -- nicely, please -- with whatever they need to know, make sure you've dealt with all the supply reqs you need to send off. I may not be commanding this unit for much longer, but I want to be sure they're not going to feel anybody's absence in a crunch."

"Got it."

Keith nodded, then stood up, and the others took that as a signal that the meeting was an end. "Oh," he said, as Pidge was almost out the door, and staring at the backs of the other three -- Sven heading right as he went to go terrorize the medical staff, Hunk and Lance going left as they went off to possibly fuck or possibly smoke or possibly do both. "I want you to know that if you take it on yourselves to try and get killed in the next three days I'm going to treat that as an act of desertion and you _still_ won't get out of these duties. Each and every one of you is coming with me, even if I have to reanimate your lifeless corpses. Clear?"

Pidge waited until the door was closed before giving Keith the finger.

He was crazy, but he wasn't _insane_.

 

*

 

Arus, Hunk decided as he watched the smoke crawl lazily from the tip of Lance's blunt to the top of the room, was not very different from any of the other backwater planets he'd been on. It was better than the hell he left, true enough, but certainly not his idea of heaven. Heaven would be the _Aspire_ , would be home, would be anywhere but this dinky little planet on the wrong side of the Drule fleet. What good was finding Voltron if they couldn't get him back to the Alliance to help anybody?

"I dunno," Lance said, voice wrapped up in the velvet tones of the mellowed out. "I think the other stuff was better."

"Yeah," Hunk said, and he rolled over and looked for the washcloth he'd put on the table before they started fucking. "Dude. I'm all sticky and shit. Where's the cloth?"

Lance giggled, said, "man, I don't know." He blew a smoke ring and Hunk found himself thinking that there was something vaguely sacrilegious about blowing smoke rings with pot smoke. "I think it fell to the floor." He passed the blunt to Hunk and rolled onto his belly, wiggling over the edge of the bed until his hair brushed the clothes that lay scattered on the floor.

"Don't see it," he called up and Hunk shrugged. It wasn't that important. He could always just go to the bathroom and wash off.

"Hey Lance, do you find this whole thing...weird," Hunk said instead, and his words surprised him. "I mean. It's different. Here."

"Yeah." Lance pushed himself back up onto the bed, flopped over. "It's like. Knowing that there's going to be a bed to fuck on and no bombs to kill the mood makes it all less fun. Or something." He grinned at Hunk, looking over at him through the strands of his hair. "I mean. It's not _bad_ or anything. Just. Different." He turned his head and stared up at the ceiling and Hunk almost swore that there were tears at the corners of Lance's eyes. "It's. I dunno. Not right, anymore."

"Yeah." Hunk took a drag off the blunt and passed it back, and grabbed Lance's cock as a replacement, sliding down the bed until they formed an almost 'T' shape. If this was going to be the last time he and Lance ever fucked -- and he was certain that it would be -- then they might as well make it a good good-bye fuck. And he knew Lance's body well enough, by now, to make their 'good-bye' amazing.

"Mmm, like that," Lance purred and twisted around until his back bent in ways that Hunk was positive were excruciatingly uncomfortable. He wondered, briefly, if he was a sick fuck for finding Lance's painful flexibility a complete and total turn on. Or maybe it was because when Lance bent his back like that he was able to reach Hunk's cock and slip it into his mouth without ever removing his own from Hunk's grasp.

Lance's cock was heavy in his mouth, a solid weight that pulsed out of time with Hunk's heart. He hummed, a little, sang a few half-remembered snatches of _Elijah_ \-- something about Baal, he thought -- and slid two fingers in while Lance trembled and mewled, a little, from pleasure. He slid in a third and Lance growled, low and gravely and in the back of his throat, "fuck, I'm ready. Stop teasing, you ass."

Hunk pulled back and sat up onto his knees, his fingers still in Lance, probing and pushing and making Lance yelp a little. "You really do like sex," he said. "I mean, really."

"What I was made for."

"Hmmm." Hunk pulled Lance onto him, and he was deep inside and grunting, a little, when he heard the loud "Whoops". He looked over toward the door, at Keith's surprised face and Sven's scowling one and the shit-eating grin on Pidge's and then the door closed and Lance collapsed against him, giggling.

"Should we stop," Lance said, hiccupping a little as he tried to catch his breath. Hunk thought it was a rather strange reaction to laugh after being caught in the middle of fucking by the two men they were trying to get over, but then Lance was just full of strange reactions.

"Nah," Hunk said. "They're not going anywhere."

"Good." And Lance pushed himself up, then lowered himself down, languid and unhurried and it was still the best sex they'd ever had, even if Lance kept breaking into giggles in the middle of it.

This time, though, Hunk made sure to shower when they were finished, and he tossed a washcloth at Lance when he came out. "You should clean yourself up," he said, but Lance just shrugged.

"Why bother? Sven knows what I am."

Hunk nodded and pulled on his pants. "Remind me to kick Pidge's ass tonight."

"Dude. Pidge could so take you down." Lance picked up the discarded blunt and for a moment Hunk thought he was gong to light it, and felt that maybe he should say something along the lines of it not being the best idea in the world to go up against Sven while stoned out of one's mind. But Lance just shredded it instead, worrying the unsmoked leaves and paper between his fingers until they were nothing more than little flakes that dotted the sheets.

"Maybe," Hunk said, "but I think today I've got more anger than he does."

"Whatever." Lance flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. "Later, Hunk."

"Yeah. Later."

Sven was waiting outside the door, and there was a pile of cigarette butts at his feet. He didn't look up as Hunk went past but Hunk stopped and almost touched him on the shoulder. "Don't worry," he said. "He's still all yours."

Sven didn't even grunt, but when Hunk looked back when he reached the end of the hallway, Sven was gone and there was a slowly disappearing trail of smoke that ended at Lance's door.

 

"So I've been thinking," Lance said when he heard the door close a second time. "And I figured something out."

"Yeah?" Sven said and even though Lance was sure that it had been Sven who'd entered his room, he was still grateful beyond reason to have been proven right.

"Yeah. And the way I figure it, the asses at the Body Farm built this thing in me, like this addiction to sex. And if I don't get fucked then I get sick. I mean, it's not enough that they made it so I just really _want_ to have sex, they made so I can't live unless I'm screwing around on a regular basis." He rolled over and grinned at Sven, like he always did, and Sven, like always, didn't smile back, so Lance turned away again. "Pretty twisted huh?"

"Yeah." The bed dipped as Sven sat down and for a while the only noise was the soft crackle of the paper on Sven's cigarette burning down.

"Yeah," Lance said at last. "Anyway. I figure, that's why I haven't been coughing up blood f'r a while. 'Cause I've been getting it on a regular basis."

"Fascinating."

"I think so." Lance toyed with sheets and maybe he should have cleaned up after himself. But Sven knew what he was, and the way Lance figured it, this was the only way he'd ever get Sven for himself. "Problem is, though, now I'm not going to be fucked on a regular basis. Since me and Hunk aren't going to do this anymore. Since it's stopped feeling right. And I figure I'm going to start getting sick again. Which, you know, that's just not going to be fun. Because it's fucking annoying to be sick."

"You could just masturbate a lot," Sven said, and Lance shook his head.

"Tried that. Doesn't work."

"I see."

"So I was thinking." Lance closed his eyes. "I was thinking. Maybe you could, you know, fuck me?" And he hated how his voice turned hopeful at the end.

"Why don't you just get some locals to do it? I'm sure there'd be hundreds of people who'd just love to help you out."

"Because." Lance took a deep breath and rolled over onto his side, almost hitting his nose on Sven's knee as he did so. He was surprised to see Sven sitting so close to him, but he decided that now was not the time to wonder about blessings and instead just curled his body around Sven's, until he was mostly speaking into Sven's stomach. "Because I love you, you moron," he mumbled. "Fuck, for a guy who's supposed to be all observant and shit you're really kind of sucky at noticing the important things."

Lance felt Sven stiffen, felt a hand touch his shoulder and try to push him away, but Lance would have none of that and just clung tighter to Sven, like a leech sinking its teeth into its prey.

"You can't," Sven said. "I mean. You're not. You're not in love with me. You can't be. You don't love me. You don't know what love is."

"Fuck you. I know that I'm supposed to be incapable, but seriously. I know what I feel. And if this isn't love then it's fucking close enough that it shouldn't matter." Lance knew he was sniffling, a little, which just annoyed him. "I just. All I want is you, asshole, and I don't think I can be happy unless I have you and not having you makes my stomach feel all funny and even fucking Hunk -- who's really hung, you know, and really good in bed, and shit, if I didn't love you I don't think I'd ever give him up -- doesn't make me happy, and if that's not love then fuck it. Just pretend that it is because. Because I'm not going to fuck anybody else and then I'm going to die and it'll be all your fucking fault."

"Shit." The hand that had been pushing at his shoulder moved to his back and Lance tensed, mostly expecting Sven to do something painful to him, like punch him in the kidneys or something. But Sven just rubbed his back, gently, like he was fresh from the vats and still hurting from the pull of gravity. "Fine. I'll fuck you. But if you cheat on me--"

"I know, I know. You'll gut me and stake me out to dry and then I'll _die_."

"No," Sven said, so quietly that Lance almost had to strain to hear his words. "You won't die. But I might."

 

*

 

Hunk found Keith in the command center, pouring over the latest results of their combat drills, and Hunk thought, 'typical.'

"Hey Skip," he said. "All work and no play, huh?"

"What?" Keith turned and then he blushed and laughed nervously. "Oh. Uh. Sorry. About, you know, barging it. It was just Pidge said there was this emergency and. Well. Sorry."

"Kid's a fucking yenta," Hunk muttered and then said, "nothing" when Keith shot him a confused look. "It's all right," he said. "No harm, no foul."

"Right." Keith looked down at his reports and cleared his throat. "Well. Listen. I've got to analyze this data so, if that's all...?"

"Yeah." And then Hunk shook his head, because damn it, this was Arus and they were never going to see the Brass again so the worse Keith could do to him was kill him. And Keith couldn't kill him because who would fly Yellow if he wasn't there? "No. That's not all." Hunk stepped closer, invaded Keith's personal space like he always did. "Look. I've got this problem."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. You. Your fucking heroic tendencies, I mean."

Keith laughed. "Right. What else is new?"

"I don't mean how you always manage to find exactly the wrong place to be at the right time, moron. I mean your whole self-sacrifice 'for the good of the team' bull shit." He grabbed Keith's hand -- his wrist, actually -- and held on tighter than maybe he should have. "I'm in love with you, you moron, and it's fucking up my ability to do my job."

"What?" Keith said. "I mean. What. What do you expect me to do about that?"

"I expect you to get over your heroism and say you love me too, because I know you Keith. And you're not as much of an idiot as I say you are. So. Do the right thing, here, because if I haven't gotten over you by now then I'm not going to be getting over you any time soon, god help me."

"But. But what if I really suck in bed? And, and what if, you know, this affects our work and we let Arus and the Alliance down? And what if you die?"

"If you suck in bed, I'll tell you and we'll fix it. And we're both professionals, Keith, we're not going to stop being that just because we're sleeping together. And you'll still be a fucking hero even if you get over this whole 'no sleeping with people you have power over' thing, and I'll still watch your back, and it'll work." Hunk moved in closer, blocked Keith in with his body. "Look, just give it a shot. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work; and if it does work then you can stop masturbating and I can stop feeling guilty about fucking people who aren't you."

"Wait, does that mean if it works you _won't_ feel guilty about cheating on me?"

"Like I could cheat," Hunk said, and he kissed Keith, hard and demanding and when he stopped Keith had to pant a little and blink his eyes.

"Wow." Keith blinked again and ran his tongue over his lips.

"I'm not going to save you this time," Hunk said.

"That's okay," Keith said. He smiled up at Hunk. "I don't think I need to be saved."

*

"So I hear you were looking to kick my ass," Pidge said the next day when he saw Hunk in the corridor.

"You got lucky, this time. But don't push it, kid." Hunk rubbed Pidge's head in the way he knew Pidge hated and walked away.

"I'm not a fucking kid!" Pidge shouted at Hunk's back.

"Yeah, kid. You are. You should remember that sometimes."

And Hunk laughed as he walked away, listening to Pidge's sputtering protests.


End file.
